Category: marketing

That was the final message of last Meetup I attended organized by the Fearless Female Founders group. Madeleine Alvarez, an experienced Business Development Consultant and Trainer, presented us the Personal Model Canvas to help us come with a clear definition of our offer. The aim of her presentation was:

Learn how to package your services and products so that your customers will see their value easier, how to align your offer to the market and how to communicate it better.

Don’t we all want that and flounder to do it? Wasn’t she clear? It’s super important that the person you talk to understands your offer from your first words. After some second, they either classify your talk as ‘interesting’ and keep their attention to your saying, or disengage and just don’t put so much attention to what you say.

The first question is to find the value for our customers of our work, not the definition of it. To help us finding the words that our interlocutor will be interested in, she showed us the Personal Business Model Canvas:

This model helps to differentiate the services (or product) characteristics we are offering from our customer’s covered needs. These last ones, that are described in this model under “How you help”, are the things we must highlight in our communication.

Then, she urged us to find a sentence that could explain our work to a 10 year’s old child. Have you ever tried that? We all know it’s important to be clear, but when working on technological fields we tend to use technical terms, and even if not in technology, usually there are words only known by the ones in the field. We dared her to do so with her job, and she amazed us!

I teach parents to say please and thank you at work, so that everybody works happily and doing their best:
– Please could you give me a report?
– Thanks for your good report.

Very interesting subject, as short videos are being used to do marketing clips to promote a new product, to present your company on internet but also to get a job: some companies ask you to send a small video to do a pre-selection before giving you a real job interview. And some real interviews are done on line, so these tips apply too!

At Waterloo Hills, we do short videos with information on ‘how-to’ going digital: you can subscribe to receive videos, each on a particular subject like how to create you e-shop, or how to take advantage of the data in Internet for improving your business.

And if not for videos, these tips also apply to your video conferences, which are becoming of greater relevance with the globalization of the work-force and also the wide spreading of teleworking.

I collected some of the tips for you, dear reader 🙂

Don’t put the camera at a different height of the main character: filming top down to you will minimize you, filming bottom up is not nice either.

Don’t change too much the camera angles, it’s disturbing.

Look directly to the camera when being informative, assertive, when you are directing a message to the viewer. When looking next to the camera, the effect is like in a movie.

Be aware of the decoration: each object in front of the camera has to be considered necessary or at least not disturbing; else it’s distracting the attention. As a bad example, look at this interview with a frame with a clown in the background!

Don’t wear stripes or peas. Don’t use a shining material, be also attentive to use a material that does not do noises when you move around (your arms for instance).

Use pastel color, so the focus is in your face and not the wall or your clothes. Red is not a good color, it makes people look unhealthy. Light blue and green are more likely to favor you.

I hope this advice will help you create wonderful videos, where the message passes along. Show me yours! I’ll be happy to see the result, I surely be reviewing my professional videos.